The CAIC Report

Today African-American and Latino residents comprise the majority of California’s public school student population. Yet, they lag behind their White and Asian classmates in college completion, according to the Pew Research Center (PRC, 2012)². In 2014, African-American students comprised six percent (373,280) and Latinos constituted 54 percent (3.3 million) of the state’s 6.2 million public school enrollment. While both groups comprise a major segment of the state’s student population, they experience large opportunity and resource disparities at every stage of the educational pipeline that ultimately result in costly achievement gaps among these groups of students.

The breadth and scope of this problem is far beyond the capacity of schools to address alone. Because of this reality, the California Education Round Table Intersegmental Coordinating Committee (ICC) developed the College Access Informational Continuum (CAIC) initiative to help students start planning for their future and to provide support for schools to build a college-going culture beginning in middle school in 2010. Importantly, the middle school juncture is a critical intersection along the educational continuum in terms of preparing students for success in college and career. If a student is not academically prepared by the time that they reach the 9th grade, they are at risk of not graduating from high school college- and career-ready. The CAIC initiative was envisioned as part of the next generation of school counseling tools to be used by all California students, their caregivers, and others responsible for preparing students to graduate college- and career-ready.

An ambitious vision served as the foundation for the CAIC when it was launched in 2010. The goal of the CAIC was to:

1. Develop engaging college and career planning curriculum and programs that inspire low-income middle and high school students to meet high academic standards so they succeed in school and their professional career;
2. Create a culturally and linguistically relevant Parent College and Career Planning curriculum so that all caregivers, including Spanish speakers, could participate as partners in planning for their student’s academic success; and,
3. 
   Increase the number of low-income students in participating schools who demonstrate improvement on key high school success metrics, including:

• grade-level continuation rates;
• mathematics and English proficiency rates;
• high school graduation rates;
• college preparatory course completion rates; and,
• college-going rates.